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CapLinked,  a Los Angeles, Calif.-based startup whose cloud-based platform enables investors to manage business transactions like mergers, acquisitions, financings, asset sales and reporting, has closed on a Series A round that the firm has been assembling since last year. The round, which is being closed with $2.1 million, includes new investors Conversion Capital, Inflection Ventures, and The Artesian Group. Previous investors in the company include 500 Startups and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. To date, CapLinked has raised more than $3 million.

PRESS RELEASE:

CapLinked (https://caplinked.com), the cloud-based platform that makes business transactions simple and secure, announced additional investors and the final results of its Series A financing round today.

The total size of the financing round came to $2.1 million. The new investors include Conversion Capital, Inflection Ventures, The Artesian Group, Chris Harris (software engineering manager at Google), and Lee Essener (founder of AccessDNA). The company previously disclosed that FF Angel, Siemer Ventures, 500 Startups, and Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal), among others, had invested $1.6 million in the Series A round. The new funding brings the company’s aggregate amount of capital raised to over $3 million.

CapLinked empowers its clients to manage complex business transactions such as mergers & acquisitions, financings, asset sales, and investor reporting. The company’s easy-to-use collaborative workspaces enable users to speed up the complicated and tedious process of managing a large deal. Built with workflow optimization in mind, CapLinked helps all parties involved in a transaction to communicate and securely exchange files, while providing customers with deal analytics and a complete audit trail.

“We’re using the proceeds from our financing round to invest in our technology, build new features, and increase sales and support,” said CapLinked CEO Eric M. Jackson. “We’re proud of our product, and I can confirm that we used our own software to manage our capital raise.”

“I was particularly drawn to CapLinked’s team, technology and vision,” said investor Lee Essner. “They have a beautiful, modern, workflow-friendly transaction management solution for corporate development teams, sell-side advisors, and private equity firms, as well as an extremely driven and impressive team that is perfectly positioned to take advantage of this big opportunity to disrupt the financial technology sector.”

Additionally, the company announced several new clients, including Edwards Lifesciences, Draper and Kramer, and Proprietary Capital. They join a growing and impressive roster of previously disclosed CapLinked clients that includes Thomson Reuters, Sun Capital, and NextView Ventures.

CapLinked provides a welcome alternative to Virtual Data Room (VDR) services for coordinating on complex business deals. The VDR industry has long been dominated by three large players (IntraLinks, Merrill Datasite, and RR Donnelly’s Venue), and the resulting lack of competition has lead to a lack of innovation for a technology that originated in the 1990s. Poor workflow, difficult set-up, and exorbitant pricing (including hidden per-page charges) have long plagued VDR customers. By contrast, CapLinked is easy to set up, workflow-friendly, and has transparent pricing.

About CapLinked
CapLinked is a cloud-based platform that makes business transactions simple and secure. CapLinked is used by companies for managing M&A transactions, raising capital, selling assets, updating investors, and conducting due diligence. The site was launched in 2011 by Eric M. Jackson (PayPal’s first head of US marketing and author of the award-winning book The PayPal Wars) and Christopher Grey (former senior private equity executive and managing director at a subsidiary of Emigrant Bank). Its investors include FF Angel, Hercules Growth Fund, Siemer Ventures, 500 Startups, 7th Rig, and Peter Thiel (the co-founder of PayPal). The Wall Street Journal called CapLinked “the go-to place for setting up and closing deals,” and Inc. named CapLinked to its list of “5 Back-Office Tech Innovations.” The company is based in Los Angeles.

Contact Information
For more information or to arrange an interview with CapLinked CEO Eric M. Jackson, contact Luke Cherrington at [email protected] or (310) 896-5045.

The post CapLinked Announces New Investors appeared first on peHUB.

Since purchasing the Vizio Co-Star several months ago, I have become a fan of Google TV. I even considered using online services to “cut the cord“. With my Amazon Prime subscription and network TV sites I will miss little. What stops me? The NFL and those networks. The league stubbornly refuses to move into the future, where other professional sports already reside, while many network websites block the Google device.

Today, PlayOn makes the barrier in front me even smaller. This is a huge move for MediaMall software. The company announces it brings full service to Google TV free of charge. It does so because of the slight that Google’s living room solution has been shown by networks. “We’ve decided to make PlayOn completely free on Google TV. Why? Well, Hulu and the Networks have been discriminating against Google TV owners by not creating apps that enable folks to watch their content on Google TV”, the company tells us.

PlayOn brings Hulu Plus (you still need a subscription), ABC, CBS, Fox, Comedy Central, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, and 50-plus more channels to the set-top box.

“Just go to www.playon.tv/googletv and you can download PlayOn to your PC from there. No need to buy a license key — the non-licensed software will just magically work on Google TVs. Then, from your Google TV, go into the Google Play Store and get the PlayOn app”, the company explains.

You will first need to install the PlayOn server software to a computer on your network — preferably one that is always on. Then visit the Google Play store to grab the brand new app.

I am now set. Sorry DirecTV, but we are breaking up. Perhaps we can get back together when Sunday Ticket time rolls around again. Or maybe the NFL will finally greet the 21st century.

Photo Credit:  holbox/Shutterstock

Though this week’s events have pushed Boston Marathon bombing headlines from the front pages of newspapers, the city of Boston is still reeling from the attacks and investigators are still digging into the bombers’ pasts.

Today, the Boston Globe is reporting that the body of suspected bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev has finally been buried. The location of the burial has been kept secret, though the Globe cites an unnamed “funeral home official briefed on the situation” as stating it did not take place in Massachusetts.

Tsarnaev’s body was reportedly taken just before midnight from the funeral home where it has been since being released to the Tsarnaev family. Tsarnaev’s uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, is reported by the Globe to have approved the burial site after having difficulties finding a cemetery that would accept the body.

The burial and transportation of the body was coordinated by Worcester police, who have also confirmed the burial. From the police statement:

As a result of our public appeal for help, a courageous and compassionate individual came forward to provide the assistance needed to properly bury the deceased. His body is no longer in the City of Worcester and is now entombed.

Tsarnaev was killed during a shootout with police that occurred shortly after the FBI determined he and his brother were the bombing suspects. Tamerlan’s brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is currently behind bars and cooperating with police. He faces up to the death penalty for charges of using a weapon of mass destruction.

(Image courtesy the comment/Johannes Hirn)

MadeiraCloud, a startup in the crowded field of Amazon Web Services monitoring and management services, snagged $1.5 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital.

The company provides a graphical visualization of the architecture and resources used by a given application, not just a spreadsheet-like list of all the AWS instances on one page and all the databases on another, said CEO Daniel O’Prey via email. MadeiraCloud got its start in Beijing and now has an office in San Francisco.

That funding comes atop about $160,000 in seed funding, and will be used to beef up the development team and to market the product. The 11-person shop has done no marketing to date.

There are a raft of companies that provide AWS monitoring and management capabilities, but O’Prey said Madeira’s simple, self-service interface probably competes most directly with the AWS Console itself. Longer term, he sees MadeiraCloud taking on companies like RightScale and Enstratrius, just acquired by Dell.

Those are some pretty big rivals to contend with but the company most of these contenders have to watch is Amazon itself, which is rolling out more and more of its own management and monitoring tools, including OpsWorks. 

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“The Ex”–a gun target made to look like a scantily-clad woman that “bleeds” when shot–has many people outraged after it debuted at an NRA convention over the weekend.

The target is made by Zombie Industries, the company that makes a “Tactical Bleeding Zombies” line, and many are questioning the wisdom of allowing men to shoot at something designed to replicate a specific type of person.

“This is outrageous and dangerous,” Laura Cutilletta, a senior staff attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said. “Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women in the United States. This reprehensible product stokes the fire of relationship violence which already claims far too many of our mothers, daughters and sisters.”

The company insists they never meant any harm with the target and have changed the name of the product to “Alexa Zombie”.

“The intention of the company was never to discriminate against women or promote violence against women,” said marketing director Roger Davis.

The convention was rife with controversy not just because of the targets, but also because of a comment Glenn Beck made comparing NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg to a Nazi.

Images: ZombieIndustries.com

Recently, the marketing director for a tech start-up told me that her CEO was furiously drafting job descriptions for a half-dozen summer interns. She was planning to bring a small army of youngsters on board to help push her business into overdrive this summer. As the director of marketing looked at her CEO quizzically, she asked, “you know you need to manage all those interns, right?”

Interns can be a great addition to your team, but beware of the well-meaning twenty-year-old who lands in your lap without any direction or guidance. If you’re planning to hire an intern (or two or three), here are four things to do before they walk through the door to ensure a successful summer for everyone involved:

Choose one or two specific projects. Interns are great for project-based work. Anything with a clear beginning, middle, and end is a good place to start — and if that project lasts between four and eight weeks, even better. Bringing a marketing intern on board to beef up marketing or a sales intern to increase leads is vague and intimidating. Instead, hire a marketing intern to launch a digital marketing campaign for college students or an HR intern to update the employee handbook.

The more discrete and concrete the project, the easier it is to identify objectives, give guidance, and measure results. And the better aligned the project is with the overall mission of your organization, the happier your intern will be — Gen Ys want to know that their work is needed and mission critical, so don’t come up with a project just for the sake of keeping someone busy. Mean it.

Put it in writing. Once you know what a prospective intern will actually be doing, craft a job description. Even for those who are hiring a colleague’s or client’s son or daughter, or others who decide to bring on an intern to meet a motivated and deserving college student (why not?), it’s still worthwhile to go through the motions and draft a job description. This will help you identify the goals and objectives of the internship, determine how you’ll measure outcomes and success, and communicate the qualifications and skills you’re looking for — great information for you to have internally and critical information for you to relay to your intern on day one.

Craft your sales pitch. Even if you think your organization’s value proposition is obvious, dig deeper. Think hard about what a twenty-something is going to get out of eight to 10 weeks of working side by side with you or your colleagues.

What will your intern walk away with? What skills and insights will he learn on the job that will help shape his career path, strengthen his network, or help him decide once and for all that advertising is the way to go (or not)? How much fun will it be? (That tech start-up in Chicago I mentioned earlier promised Cubs season tickets along with an office located in the heart of Chicago’s nightlife.)

Make sure you communicate your value proposition to potential interns up front and hold yourself to the standards you set as the summer goes on.

Know the difference between being a manager and a mentor. Do you have time to actively manage your intern(s) or are you better suited as a mentor? As a manager, you need to commit to a significant upfront investment at the start of the summer — showing your intern the ropes, making introductions, finding a physical place for her to sit and work, going for lunch on day one — and providing feedback throughout the summer. Add to that a weekly one-on-one meeting (at least) and suddenly, managing an intern can turn from an exciting prospect to a daunting proposition.

If you don’t have the appetite, the capacity, or even the skill set to manage your intern (be honest with yourself), then you’ve got to find someone else to stand in your stead. Look for a rising star in your organization who is excited about managing someone junior. This can be a great opportunity to give an individual contributor a first taste of the highs and lows of managing others. And commit to serving as a mentor yourself for informal coaching, guidance, and socializing, or tap others on your team for that role, too.

As with anything in life, the more effort you put in, the better results you’ll get out. Investing time and energy now will set your intern up for success before she even walks though the door.

Stay tuned for another post in June for tips on what to do once that internship starts — and how to manage it all summer long.

While we’ve seen nothing official, and Facebook has specifically said that it will not comment on speculation, reports have come out that the company is buying mapping/traffic app Waze for up to $1 billion.

TechCrunch points to reports in the Israeli press from Calcalist, Ynet and The Marker (all in Hebrew) indicating that Facebook is in “advanced due dilligence on a deal,” and that negotiations have been going on for six months.

TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden reports: “We have been digging too and have picked up confirmation from a source that both sides have privately confirmed that the deal is happening, and that the pricing reported first by the Calcalist [between $800 million and $1 billion] is accurate.”

The deal would apparently be a move for Facebook to capture more mobile users, not unlike its famous Instagram deal.

Reports of Facebook’s interest in Waze are nothing new. There was talk that the two companies were in discussions at least as far back as August, when Globes reported, “The purpose of the talks is not known, but the two companies are reportedly headed for collaboration, possibly involving the use of Waze’s application via Facebook. Alternatively, Facebook may acquire Waze.”

Waze is an Israeli startup, but its main office is in Palo Alto.

Late yesterday, Microsoft announced that Windows Phone 8 users from all over the world can now finally take advantage of the complete photo and video backup feature offered by its smartphone operating system. This comes a tad over six months after the Windows Phone 8 release in late-October, last year. A little too late, wouldn’t you agree?

Previously, users from a number of regions were constricted to use a dumbed-down backup feature that only allowed automatically upload of low-resolution pictures (no video support) straight to SkyDrive. “We just started to light this up, so be patient if you don’t see it right away. The change could take a few days to roll out around the globe”, Aaron Sauvé, Microsoft senior program manager says.

To be honest I haven’t even noticed that this dumbed-down feature was even available. I have owned the HTC Windows Phone 8X and the Nokia Lumia 920 (which is still with me today) and on both smartphones, with US regional settings, the complete photo and video backup options are available and fully working. And I’m using it as intended in the land of Dracula, so I don’t understand why Microsoft decided to take it slow.

But, there is an excuse, albeit not one that makes a lot of sense to me. “As you can imagine, backing up high-res photos and videos involves a lot of data”, says Microsoft. “To ensure we could provide a quality experience in each market, we deliberately took things slow and planned a staged roll out of the feature”.

So what’s the actual holdup? Clearly, the only separating factor between having this full-size backup feature and its dumbed-down version is the regional settings option, and not the actual country where the user lives. The feature uses solely the available SkyDrive storage, and nothing more. And if users already have a SkyDrive account (which is required for the feature to work) why screw them over?

Photo Credit: JohnKwan/Shutterstock

Final Book Now Available

Sensors, satellite photography, and multispectral imaging are associated with futuristic space and communications science. Increasingly, however, they are considered part of the future of agriculture. The use of advanced technologies for crop production is known as precision agriculture, and its rapid emergence means the potential for revolutionary change throughout the agricultural sector.

Precision Agriculture in the 21st Century provides an overview of the specific technologies and practices under the umbrella of precision agriculture, exploring the full implications of their adoption by farmers and agricultural managers. The volume discusses how precision agriculture could dramatically affect decisionmaking in irrigation, crop selection, pest management, environmental issues, and pricing and market conditions. It also examines the geographical dimensions–farm, regional, national–of precision agriculture and looks at how quickly and how widely the agricultural community can be expected to adopt the new information technologies.

Precision Agriculture in the 21st Century highlights both the uncertainties and the exciting possibilities of this emerging approach to farming. This book will be important to anyone concerned about the future of agriculture: policymakers, regulators, scientists, farmers, educators, students, and suppliers to the agricultural industry.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Agriculture

Glenn Beck is well-known for using hyperbole, conspiracy theories, and provocative imagery to keep himself relevant to conservatives. However, during his keynote speech this weekend at the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Annual Meeting, Beck went full-on Godwin’s law, characterizing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a Nazi.

According to a report from New York news station WABC, during the presentation Beck showed a satirical advertisement for New York City that showed Bloomberg, who is Jewish, giving a Nazi salute. Predictably, the Anti-Defamation League has criticized Beck’s presentation, calling it “insensitive and deeply offensive.”

The NRA has been battling gun restriction legislation since the Newtown shooting. In order to increase the legitimacy of their positions, the organization has been cleaning house and distancing itself from some of the more radical elements of the U.S. gun culture. Though Beck’s hour-and-a-half speech was largely filled with mainstream pro-gun arguments, his Nazi imagery could end up overshadowing the NRA’s meeting.

Last week’s NRA convention also gained attention this week after the organization requested a company called Zombie Industries remove a mannequin shooting target that resembles President Obama from its booth.

Beck’s Nazi Bloomberg reference occurs at around the 58-minute mark in the video of the speech below:

Might & Magic: Heroes VI – Shades of Darkness is a long name for a video game, and a bad sign when it comes to the quality of the experience offered by the expansion created by Ubisoft.

There are two new campaigns to enjoy, one focused on the new Dark Elves and their Dungeon city, and another linked to the Necropolis.

The game also introduces new heroes, new units, an Artificial Intelligence that’s supposed to be smarter, and a host of other improvements.<... (read more)

With more virtualization, IT consumerization and a lot more data – the data center needs a new way of deploying high-density computing platforms. In this white paper, IDC (with sponsorship from VCE) outlines the rapid growth in high-density computing needs. By downloading this paper, you can learn how IDC  found that higher utilization of IT assets and operational efficiency — which results from running more virtual machines on new-generation servers — reaches a plateau and often levels out at a certain point. This happens because the shift to virtualized servers often leads to strains in other areas of the infrastructure:

• Virtual server sprawl increases server/storage/network stress and the accompanying administrative burdens required to deal with this stress. This makes support/maintenance more challenging and threatens application performance.
• Handling this anticipated pressure by overloading/overprovisioning storage and data network facilities forces time-consuming, costly, and often unnecessary hardware upgrades.
• Application performance and recovery behaviors (data recovery and cleanup) on error conditions can vary unexpectedly, stalling plans to migrate more business critical applications to virtual environments.

The reality within the data center world is pretty direct: The infrastructure management challenge in has increased, as depicted in the “Virtualization Management Gap” in Figure 1. Furthermore, IDC and this white paper indicate how recent research shows that IT departments now spend three-quarters (76.8%) of their time and resources maintaining the environment and less than a quarter (23.2%) on value-added activities.

In this white paper, IDC outlines how the data center is entering a new business cycle in IT where customers are prepared to trade choice for both ease of installation and simplicity of management. While the majority of customers are still evaluating converged systems, over a quarter (27.4% — approximately double the previous year’s percentage) are currently using or planning to use them. IDC expects adoption to increase as 44% (also double the previous year’s percentage) of those considering convergence will likely adopt in the next three years.

There are direct data center technologies which help deliver high-density computing, excellent resource utilization and of course the ability to converge an infrastructure. Formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel, this white paper outlines the vBlock platform and how VCE markets an integrated converged infrastructure solution for the data center. In fact, VCE develops a range of platforms and solutions for virtualized environments based on components from Cisco, EMC, and VMware. Download this white paper today to learn how VCE’s goal is to accelerate the adoption of converged infrastructure and cloud-based computing models which prove to dramatically reduce the cost of IT while improving management and growth capabilities.

Lingerie makers in Japan have come up with a clever marketing strategy to get the word out about what Prime Minister Shinzo Abe calls “Abenomics”: put pretty women in sexy padded bras and compare it to inflating the economy.

Abe, whose primary objective is to stimulate percent inflation in his country’s struggling economy, has got several companies backing him, including lingerie house Triumph. Their bras are insanely popular in Japan and have a loyal following after concepts like “solar-powered” and “husband hunting” hit the markets. Their latest creation, the “Abenomics” model, won’t be for sale, but rather strictly used to promote for the brand.

“To link in with ‘Abenomics’ and its three arrows of growth economic strategy, we decided to create something aimed at women. So with that in mind, we came up with the ‘Branomics Bra’,” Triumph spokeswoman Yoshiko Masuda said. “We’ve put in these pads that boost the bra’s cups by 2 percent. We hope that as the Japanese economy grows, we can also help bust sizes to get bigger.”

Grand Theft Auto V is coming out this year. It will probably be called a revolution in story telling and open world crime games. It will be all the rage, but the developers at Volition think they can take on GTAV this year with their own open-world crime game – Saints Row IV.

The guys at Volition have released a lengthy new trailer for what is expected to be the most ridiculous game of the year. As expected, it looks like great fun and it could be another hit for the former THQ studio that proved to the world that open-world games don’t have to be serious affairs:

Saints Row IV will get a month head start on Grand Theft Auto V, but comparisons will still inevitably me made. Regardless, it’s safe to assume that gamers will have enough goodwill and cash to reward both titles with plenty of love.

Saints Row IV will be out on August 20 for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

Spotify is the world’s most popular streaming music service with some 24 million active uses, around 6 million of those paying a subscription for premium services. I use Spotify all the time; it’s a great way of finding and sampling new music, and the company’s deals with major labels go a long way to legitimizing the streaming model.

Yesterday though, Spotify acted to change its website player after a Dutch developer released a Chrome extension that allowed MP3s to be downloaded from the site. Google removed the Downloadify plug-in from its site before Spotify applied the fix to the player, which now uses an encrypted format.

Robin Aldenhoven, the man behind Downloadify opines on his Twitter stream, “I could not believe it myself that they did so little to protect their library”. But he also supports Spotify’s obligation to copyright holders saying, “Google responded correctly to remove, but Spotify should not send DRM-free MP3s to users”.

Of course, we all know that streaming services have long been vulnerable to this type of thing. There are plenty of freely available tools to allow the ripping of music from YouTube, for example, even though it’s a clear breach of the site’s terms of service.

Although this latest issue might seem like a major problem for Spotify, I don’t think it’s really the “nightmare” that some bloggers call it.

The vulnerability didn’t affect the service’s desktop or mobile clients, just the web player, which only launched last November. Plus you need to sign up for an account to be able to access Spotify so you are traceable and frankly there are easier ways to find free MP3s if you really want to.

The real risk is that if this sort of thing happens too often the major record labels will lose faith in the Spotify business model — and indeed that of other streaming services — and may decide not to renew their license agreements. At the moment, it seems that the company’s fast action to plug this hole is enough to retain confidence. I hope it is, my nightmare would be if Spotify disappeared altogether.

Photo Credit: Joe Wilcox

A small New York publisher that uses the label “ibooks” has struck out in its lawsuit against Apple, after a New York court on Wednesday held that the publisher’s mark was not distinct and that consumers would not confuse the two companies’ products.

The case began in 2011 after Black Tower Press, a publisher of sci-fi and fantasy titles, filed a trademark suit in response to Apple’s announcement that it would use the word “iBooks” to describe software that allows users to purchase online books. Here’s a look at the two marks:

Black Tower came into possession of the “ibooks” mark in 2006 by purchasing the assets of another publishing company that had used the word for an imprint that sold millions of sci-fi and horror books in the early 2000′s. Neither Black Tower nor its predecessor, however, obtained a registered trademark for the word.

Apple, on the other hand, did obtain registered trademark rights. It first obtained a license to use “iBook” from another software company in 1999 to describe a line of colorful computers; in 2010, Apple bought the other company’s trademark entirely.

In a detailed decision, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote explained that the word “ibooks” was simply descriptive of books sold on the internet, and that Black Tower had not acquired any distinctive meaning in the word — only in the word and lightbulb logo used together.

Cote also wrote that she was granting summary judgment to Apple for a second reason: that no consumers would be confused by the two companies’ products:

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